The seasonal south swell has returned to Doran Beach, piling up shapely waves along with lashings of Bull Kelp. Last year I was intent upon taming the kelp for a wild-crafted, bioregional chair. My dream remains intact but this year I’m more seduced by the waves. enormous tangles of kelp accumulate along the shore after […]
Tag Archives: california flora
The Week in Bloom
Now the sanderling outnumber the dowitcher along the Sonoma Coast, where heaps of kelp remind of the season’s first storms. Last week’s extratropical activity dumped up to ten inches of rain from Typhoon Melor, which blew across the Pacific from Japan. The uncharacteristically humid, warm weather forced some unlikely blossoming, turned the local pastures green, […]
Bottling the Cider
the Golden Orb Weaver (Argiope aurantia) sets her net in the breezy autumn garden Like all the other creatures marking this time of year- spiders weaving webs around the garden, hungry deer grazing roadside, the long-billed Dowitcher foraging the beach or geese flying Southeast in their familiar, honking ‘V’- we’ve been busy making provisions for […]
Comice Pear Harvest
our own freshly harvested Comice pears (Pyrus communis) After pressing the majority of our Bartlett pears into cider, some of which we combined with the juice of ripe Roma apples, we made a point of reserving our delicious Comice pears for eating raw. The large pear has the juiciest, creamiest fruit, and its flavors combine […]
Giant Fish Sculptures Commence
‘feeder fish’, like these anchovies abound this time of year (public domain image) I’ve begun making the scale models for our giant, mosaic fish sculptures that will live permanently outside the new building for the Ocean View branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission, the project is the […]
The Week in Bloom
stacks of cedar dry in the warm September air I counted five Kestrel perched along barbed wire as I wound down Marshall-Petaluma Road towards Tomales Bay from Evan Shively’s mill. I had been inspecting the deodar cedar (Cedrus deodara) Evan milled for my latest interior design commission, and I was delighted to find the fragrant […]
The Week in Bloom
A freak thunderstorm over the weekend jolted the late summer halo, bringing cooler, moister air with more than a hint of autumn. The gardens are yielding the last and brightest of their fruits, and in the Ernsts’ woods where we cut firewood, waxy chestnuts are weighing down the branches. strongyloides pcr post ivermectin The air […]